There's little forgiveness in science: mistaken hypotheses are discarded without sentiment and forgotten. The reasons seem obvious. Science is a tool for understanding and manipulating the world, and what use are outdated tools? But consider how we memorialise earlier forms of literature and art. Apart from the pleasure they give us, they are a way of understanding ourselves, a mirror held up to our culture and modes of thought. Could the same be said of defunct science?

I hope so. There is too much romance in the history of science for it to be ignored. Scientists themselves might be busy with other things, but the rest of us can profit by picking over the tidbits left behind. Majorie C Malley's book is rich in these. In a world long before neutrinos began travelling faster than light, we hear about "corpuscles", the discovery of "uranium X", the appearance of a mysterious element called ionium, researches into "radium emanation" and rays of all sorts. The book is a portrait of the early years of the radioactive age, and it documents all the false starts, blind alleys and triumphs that come with the birth of a new field.

Malley makes the point that 19th-century Europeans had been dazzled by recent advances in theory, particularly electromagnetism, which reinforced the sense that there was a realm beyond the material world which was only just beginning to give up its secrets. At the same time, there was a surging interest in the supernatural, and spiritualism filled theatres and parlours across the west. In Germany, Wilhelm Röntgen noticed that a fluorescent substance on the other side of his darkened laboratory glowed whenever he turned on an apparatus that generated cathode-rays. The fluorescence was the result of an invisible beam that could penetrate objects and travel far across space – and which he named the X-ray.

The frontier Röntgen opened up attracted the best scientific minds, among them Henri Bequerel and Pierre and Marie Curie. Bequerel discovered another type of ray given out by uranium minerals, which clouded photographic plates. The Curies deduced that these samples also contained another substance, which produced more powerful rays: this turned out to be a wholly new element, polonium. A second element was discovered in a similar way, radium, which in turn gave rise to a gas, called radon. Nobel prizes showered down, and the discoveries – of polonium and radium in 1898, gamma rays and radon in 1900, the alpha particle in 1902 – came thick and fast.

The personal toll on the scientists is well-documented but, curiously, Malley waits until two thirds of the way through her book to mention the harmful effects of radioactive substances. To get enough radium for their experiments, the Curies ordered 220lb of pitchblende, a uranium ore, and processed it themselves in the courtyard of their ramshackle laboratory. Their notebooks are dangerously radioactive today. Pierre strapped a sample of radium to his arm for hours at a time to test its effects on human tissue, while others carried material around in their pockets. Marie Curie died of aplastic anaemia brought on by radiation, and her daughter of leukaemia. Outside the scientific community, radium and radioactivity had been seized on as miracle cures. Radium salts were consumed in freely available tonics. Radon was inhaled by tuberculosis sufferers. Radium spas sprang up, and resorts were built around supposedly radioactive sources of water. Luckily for some patrons – although they would have felt cheated had they known at the time – the water at these places often didn't contain the element, the price of which had shot up.

So there is much to conjure with here: a laboratory full of gently glowing powders, "fairy lights" that were a source of delight but also of death to Curie and her daughter; seances enlivened by X-rays; the shift in perception from a tangible world to one of waves and "energy". Unfortunately, Malley, a retired academic, is too systematic in her approach. Discussion of radioactivity's cultural significance is divorced from the scientific narrative, which in turn is separated out according to theme in endless subdivisions. There's a sense of disjointedness, and the book ends up feeling too much like a course of study to fire the imagination. This is a missed opportunity: in a scientific world, stories of this kind should be as familiar to laypeople as Biblical narratives once were. Malley's writing, informative but sterile, fails to bring them alive.